Have you decided to purchase bamboo flooring? Great choice. Bamboo is not only beautiful, but it is durable as heck. It’s also a natural product. While there is a minimal variation from production run to production run, you still want to get your flooring from one production lot and buy a sufficient quantity to finish the project with a little bit left over.

So, how do you figure out how much bamboo flooring to buy? Start by measuring your rooms:

How to Measure Square Rooms to Measure Flooring Needed

Calculating how much bamboo flooring to purchase boils down to measuring the Square footage of the room and a little extra for waste and future repairs.

In case it’s been a few years since your last math class, Square Footage is calculated by multiplying length times width.

Easy peasy if your room is square, right? Just whip out that laser measuring device or go old school with a tape measure and measure the length of the square room from wall to wall and measure the width of the room from wall to wall. Don’t forget the closet! Be sure to measure it too.

Now multiply the length of the room by the width of the room and you’ve got your square footage of that room. Be sure to calculate the square footage of the closet and add that in too. If you get confused and accidentally multiply the width by the length, that’s okay. The answer is the same.

Numbers are funny that way.

But what if your room isn’t square?

How to Measure Irregular Shaped Rooms to Measure Flooring Needed

Let’s face it, few rooms in American homes are perfect squares. That’s okay because those irregularly spaced rooms make the most of the overall footprint of the home. But they make it tricky to measure for flooring.

So, the most effective approach is to break the room down into squares and then measure the squares.

Confused?

Don’t be. This is pretty easy.

For an L-shaped room, you would break the room into two squares using a roll of painter’s tape. Then measure each square separately. Calculate the square footage of each section and add them together.

It’s the same process you use for measuring a room with a closet.

But what about rooms that are shaped like a triangle or a circle? Ambient makes measuring odd-shaped rooms to figure out how much bamboo flooring to buy easy. Check out this hand square footage calculator to find the square footage of odd-shaped rooms.

Add For Cutting, Waste, and A Stash of Planks

During installation, the bamboo flooring planks require cutting. That means you are going to waste a bit. The more intricate the installation pattern, the more cutting and waste.

As a rule of thumb, add 10% extra to cover this cutting and waste. You’ll also want a few planks on hand in case the floor ever needs repair.

To calculate the 10%, take the square footage and multiply by .10. Next add this number to your total square footage.

Now you know the answer to the question, how much bamboo flooring should I buy?

Real-Life Example – Determining How Much Bamboo Flooring To Buy

Jim and Kristin want to install Copenhagen extra wide bamboo flooring planks as part of their bedroom remodeling project.

The bedroom consists of the main area and a smaller sitting area. They measure the two areas separately in determining how much bamboo flooring to buy.

Main bedroom area:  10 x 20 = 200 square feet

Smaller area:      10 x 15 = 150 square feet

Total square footage: 350 square feet x .10 for cutting = 35 square feet

Total square footage to purchase 350 + 35 = 385 square feet

The post Figuring Out How Much Bamboo Flooring to Buy appeared first on The Greener Living Blog.